Rory McIlroy doesn’t like proposals to limit the length of golf clubs to reduce hitting distance. CC-licensed photo by Ed Balaun “supergolfdude” on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Not fungible. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Price of going net zero about to be driven home for Britons • Financial Times

Peter Foster:

»

Hitting the net zero target [set for 2050] will require sweeping changes in two key areas: transport, as the shift to electric cars accelerates, and buildings, where an overhaul is required to the way 30m homes are heated and insulated.

And the shift to low-carbon vehicles and swapping out of gas boilers for electric heat pumps presents the government with a series of delicate political and fiscal choices.

The projected cost is immense: the CCC estimates that annual capital spending largely by the private sector in greening the economy will peak at £50bn a year by 2030. That represents about one-eighth of current annual investment by the public and private sectors.

However, the CCC calculates that from the mid-2040s savings in operating spending — stemming in significant part from how it will be cheaper to run an electric car than a petrol-engine vehicle — will start to exceed the annual investment.

The greening of transport and homes will create winners and losers, and the government has yet to clarify where the cost burden will fall. The Treasury has said it will later this year publish a net zero review, setting out in more detail “how the costs of achieving net zero emissions are distributed”.

For transport, which the CCC estimates will require £11.4bn of average annual investment over the next 30 years, the political pathway is easier than for buildings, according to Josh Buckland, who was an adviser to former business secretary Greg Clark and is now at consultancy firm Flint Global.

“Transport is to some degree a solvable problem,” he said. “Consumers can buy cars through financing deals, and so don’t have to pay up front costs.”

Still, there are political potholes ahead. As the UK car fleet goes electric, the Treasury will need to find a way to recoup the £37bn a year it currently secures from carbon taxes, mostly fuel duty and vehicle excise duty.

«

That’s the really, really big question. Though total government spend in 2018/9 was £771bn, which doesn’t make it look that much.
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Rookie coding mistake prior to Gab hack came from site’s CTO • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

Over the weekend, word emerged that a hacker breached far-right social media website Gab and downloaded 70 gigabytes of data by exploiting a garden-variety security flaw known as an SQL injection. A quick review of Gab’s open source code shows that the critical vulnerability—or at least one very much like it—was introduced by the company’s chief technology officer.

The change, which in the parlance of software development is known as a “git commit,” was made sometime in February from the account of Fosco Marotto, a former Facebook software engineer who in November became Gab’s CTO. On Monday, Gab removed the git commit from its website.

«

SQLi is a decades-old hacking method, and one that everyone coding for a site allowing input should know to watch for and guard against. This is amateurish.
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MyHeritage Deep Nostalgia™, deep learning technology to animate the faces in still family photos • MyHeritage

»

Animate the faces in your family photos with amazing technology. Experience your family history like never before!

Free signup is required. Photos uploaded without completing signup are automatically deleted to protect your privacy.

The remarkable technology for animating photos was licensed by MyHeritage from D-ID, a company specializing in video reenactment using deep learning. MyHeritage integrated this technology to animate the faces in historical photos and create high-quality, realistic video footage. The Deep Nostalgia™ feature uses several drivers prepared by MyHeritage. Each driver is a video consisting of a fixed sequence of movements and gestures. Deep Nostalgia™ can very accurately apply the drivers to a face in your still photo, creating a short video that you can share with your friends and family. The driver guides the movements in the animation so you can see your ancestors smile, blink, and turn their heads. This really brings your photos to life!

The Deep Nostalgia™ feature requires a high-resolution face to apply the animation, but faces in historical photos tend to be small and blurry. That’s why we combined this feature with the MyHeritage Photo Enhancer, which brings blurry and low-resolution photos into focus by increasing their resolution and sharpening the faces that appear in them.

«

This must be the smartest recruitment drive ever: you can’t see the effects if you don’t sign up. (I stopped short of completion twice, because I just don’t need another email to unsubscribe from, and I don’t have any really old family photos.) But the effect is very impressive, while also spooky.
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Covid-19 vaccine passports: British public support for travel, gyms, care homes • Bloomberg

Katharine Gemmell:

»

Nearly a third of UK adults have had at least one Covid-19 vaccine shot. Now a wide majority of Britons support a controversial next step: so-called vaccine passports that would allow some to return to a more-normal life.

New data provided to Bloomberg by YouGov show that 65% of British people say they would support a document that would theoretically allow vaccinated people to return to workplaces, bars and even travel again before those who haven’t had their shots.

The poll found 76% support requiring proof of vaccination for people entering the UK from abroad as soon as possible, with 16% opposed to the idea. Support was broadly steady across the political spectrum, as well as among people who voted for or against Brexit.

The UK government is reviewing the idea of requiring proof of vaccine for certain activities, which is already becoming standard in Israel, another country leading the vaccination drive. The World Health Organization opposes requiring proof of immunization in part because it’s not clear whether vaccinated people can still spread the infection. And critics say a vaccine-passport system would be discriminatory and create an elite class of people with access to the shot.

In the UK, older people, who are more likely to be vaccinated, also were more in favour of requiring proof of vaccination than younger people, who would theoretically be more restricted if requirements were put in place soon.

For Britons aged 65 and above, 77% support the speedy rollout of vaccination passports within the UK, compared with 47% of those between the ages of 18 and 24.

«

Wouldn’t have thought anyone is suggesting this be introduced before every adult has had a shot – by the summer. It feels ineluctable: the demand will trickle down from care home staff to people in private hospitals and restaurants and the dam will break, and it’ll just be accepted, with some moaning from those who have been moaning about the imposition of lockdown, and the imposition of rules about masks.
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The benefits of microdosing might be down to the placebo effect • WIRED UK

Victoria Turk:

»

In 2018, volunteers with an interest in microdosing – regularly taking tiny amounts of psychedelic drugs such as LSD – began taking part in an unusual experiment. For four weeks, researchers at Imperial College London asked them to swap some of their drugs with empty capsules – placebos – so that when they took them, they didn’t know if they were microdosing or not. They then completed online surveys and cognitive tasks at regular intervals, aimed at gauging their mental wellbeing and cognitive abilities. The idea: to explore if microdosing produces the benefits to mood and brain function that some people claim.

In a paper published in the journal eLife, the researchers reveal their findings. After the month-long testing period, they found that all psychological outcomes had improved since the start of the experiment for those in the microdosing group, including “in the domains of wellbeing, mindfulness, life satisfaction and paranoia.” However, the same was true for the placebo group – with no significant differences between the two.

“So, in a way, microdosing did increase a lot of these psychological variables,” says Balazs Szigeti, a research associate at Imperial College London Centre of Psychedelic Research and the lead author of the study. “But so did taking placebos for four weeks.”

«

Placebos really are the wonder drug. They should try a double-blind trial where *both* arms get placebos, except one side is told placebos have lots of effects and the other is told they do nothing.
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Free-to-use ATMs vanishing at alarming rate, says Which? • Yahoo Finance

Vicky Shaw:

»

Free-to-use cash machines are vanishing at an alarming rate, according to Which?

The consumer group said its latest analysis suggests there has been a spike in the number of people forced to pay to withdraw their own money from ATMs.

Some of the most deprived areas, where people are more likely to depend on cash, have seen a significant shift from free-to-use dispensers to machines that generally charge up to £2 per withdrawal in recent years, Which? found.

Which? wants to see a “clear blueprint” on the future of cash. The Government has previously pledged to legislate on the issue.

Which? said that, since 2018, two Birmingham constituencies – Hall Green and Hodge Hill – have experienced 44% and 40% reductions respectively in free-to-use ATMs, and both have seen a 59% increase in pay-to-use machines. Nottingham East has seen 43% of free cash machines closed, but an 11% increase in pay-to-use machines, Which? said. It said all three locations are within the top 10% for deprivation in England.

ATMs are the most commonly-used means of withdrawing cash, with UK Finance figures showing 91% of cash withdrawals took place through cash machines in 2019.

While there are other options, such as cashback and counter withdrawals that may play a greater role in future, ATMs currently remain an important indicator of access levels, Which? said.

«

Cash is essential for those locked out of the contactless economy – which is a lot of those in poorer groups. The rise of paid machines is thus a double whammy on them.
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Pay cuts, taxes, child care: what another year of remote work will look like • WSJ

Chip Cutter and Emily Glazer:

»

Companies are anticipating another largely remote work year, and new questions about compensation and benefits are weighing on managers.

Discussions about the future of work, such as whether to reduce the salaries of employees who have left high-cost cities, are priority items in board meetings and senior executive sessions across industries, according to chief executives, board members and corporate advisers.

Among the questions companies are trying to resolve: who should shoulder tax costs as employees move to new locations while working remotely? And what is the most effective way to support working parents?

Companies say there is much at stake, from the happiness and productivity of employees to regulatory consequences, if they get these decisions wrong.

Employees’ relocations to new cities, states and countries have companies and workers grappling with tax concerns.

Facebook Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees last year that, beginning in January, the company would use its virtual private network, or VPN, that employees use to access company systems to determine where they were working for tax purposes. [The company ultimately decided not to.]

…The prolonged remote spell is putting pressure on companies to give parents more help with child care—while being careful not to rankle workers without dependents.

«

I don’t understand this last part. Those with dependents (well, children) have always been at a disadvantage in normal work environments: juggling responsibilities if a child is sick or school is out, or childcare is expensive, or the childcare ends before work does. Those without children honestly have no idea, and no grounds to feel rankled.
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A grizzled, months-old Chrome tab welcomes a fresh-faced new tab to my browser window • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Simon Henriques:

»

Yeah, I’ve seen things. Things I wish I could forget. I’ve seen a tab of Twitter get closed, then a new one opened right back up in its place. I’ve seen tabs get opened just to do a quick arithmetic problem in the search bar — then closed before they even got the chance to visit a single website. And don’t get me started on the bloodbaths they call crossword puzzles. Dozens of good, honest tabs opened just to look up some misspelled obscure proper noun, then closed in shame once they’ve helpfully suggested the right word. It’s a dangerous world out here. The sooner you understand that, the sooner you’ll find some kind of peace amidst this chaos we call home.

Here, I’ll introduce you to some of the guys. On the end, that’s Gmail. He’s the only one been around longer’n me, and he’s not going anywhere. Practically invincible. This fella next to me has a page of upstate real estate listings that get refreshed every so often. We call him The Dreamer. And that’s Bank Web Portal. He’s sat idle so long that he’s auto-logged out. That’s a death sentence. As soon as he gets noticed, he’s a goner. Don’t stare, son.

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Wonderful. Reminiscent of John Gruber’s “An Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal Interface Theme Shows Up for the WWDC Preview Build of Mac OS X Leopard“, from June 2007. (Via John Naughton.)
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Golf: McIlroy slams proposed rule changes to reduce hitting distance • Reuters

Reuters Staff:

»

Rory McIlroy has criticised golf’s lawmakers for considering changes to equipment that would tame the power of the game’s big hitters, saying the campaign is “a huge waste of time and money”.

The Royal and Ancient (R&A), in conjunction with the United States Golf Association (USGA), has proposed reducing driver shaft length to 46 inches from the current limit of 48.

Another “area of interest” for the R&A and USGA is for the potential use of local rules that would specify the use of clubs and/or balls, resulting in shorter distances.

The proposals are part of the latest updates to the Distance Insights Report published last February that said increased hitting distances changed the challenge of the game and risked making courses obsolete.

“I think the authorities are looking at the game through such a tiny little lens, that what they’re trying to do is change something that pertains to 0.1% of the golfing community,” four-times major champion McIlroy said.

“Ninety-nine% of the people that play this game play for enjoyment. They don’t need to be told what ball or clubs to use.”

«

McIlroy must know that the R&A has legislated again and again down the years on what things are and aren’t legal in the game. And other professional sports impose differences on the top levels – baseball players must use wood, not the aluminium bats used in lower leagues. Football pitches vary in size.

The reduction in shaft length from 48in to 46in would in theory reduce head velocity by, what, 4% (smaller radius), and so reduce the energy imparted to the ball by 8% (96% squared = 92%). Doesn’t that make the gap in favour of the big hitters even bigger, proportionally? (Via John Naughton.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Biden administration is dramatically raising the theoretical price per tonne of carbon emitted. That’s going to have a lot of effects. CC-licensed photo by John Englart on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. And only you. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Biden is hiking the cost of carbon. It will change how the US tackles global warming • The Washington Post

Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis:

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The administration plans to boost the figure it will use to assess the damage that greenhouse gas pollution inflicts on society to $51 per ton of carbon dioxide — a rate more than seven times higher than that used by former president Donald Trump’s administration. But the number, known as the “social cost of carbon,” could reach as high as $125 per ton once the administration conducts a more thorough analysis.

In a recent interview, Biden’s national climate adviser, Gina McCarthy, said the administration is setting an initial price to inform its policies “and then work more diligently about what the actual cost might be as we move forward, and get the information that we need to be able to do that.”

The ultimate figure will be incorporated into decisions across the federal government, including what sort of purchases it makes, the kind of pollution controls it imposes on industry and which highways and pipelines are permitted in the years to come. Just as important, the move sends a powerful signal to the private sector and to ordinary Americans that the choices the country makes now could lock in disastrous consequences on both current and future generations — or help to avert the worst impacts.

“A new social cost of carbon can tip the scales for hundreds of policy decisions facing the federal government,” said Tamma Carleton, assistant professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “Any policy, project or regulation that lowers emissions will now have a higher dollar value, reflecting the many benefits future Americans enjoy when emissions fall today.”

“Confronting climate change will cost money,” she said. And putting a higher price on global warming’s damages, she added, “highlights the large hidden costs of doing nothing.”

While this is not a new tax that consumers would have to pay, it would make it harder for fossil fuel projects to win government approval by factoring in their long-term costs to society.

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E-mail is making us miserable • The New Yorker

Cal Newport:

»

When employees are miserable, they perform worse. They’re also more likely, as the French labor minister warned, to burn out, leading to increased health-care costs and expensive employee turnover. A Harvard Business School professor found that giving a group of management consultants predictable time off from e-mail increased the percentage of them who planned to stay at the firm “for the long term” from forty% to fifty-eight%. E-mail’s power to makes us unhappy also has more philosophical implications. There are two hundred and thirty million knowledge workers in the world, which includes, according to the Federal Reserve, more than a third of the U.S. workforce. If this massive population is being made miserable by a slavish devotion to in-boxes and chat channels, then this adds up to a whole lot of global miserableness! From a utilitarian perspective, this level of suffering cannot be ignored—especially if there is something that we might be able to do to alleviate it.

Given these stakes, it’s all the more surprising that we spend so little time trying to understand the source of this discontent. Many in the business community tend to dismiss the psychological toll from e-mail as an incidental side effect caused by bad in-box habits or a weak constitution. I’ve come to believe, however, that much deeper forces are at play in generating our mismatch with this tool, including some that get at the very core of what drives us as humans.

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Though of course not the daily email in which this link appears. Don’t need to say that.
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Twitter to launch subscription service Super Follows, aims to double revenue by 2023 • WSJ

Sarah E. Needleman:

»

Dantley Davis, Twitter’s head of design and research, said that “an audience-funded model where subscribers can directly fund the content that they value most is a durable incentive model that aligns interests of creators and consumers.”

Twitter disclosed the new business models at an online event for analysts, its first in several years, and said they are part of Twitter’s broader goal of reaching at least $7.5 billion in revenue or more by 2023, up from the $3.7 billion it made last year, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. The company is projecting its daily user base to grow to at least 315 million by the end of 2023, or around 20% annually between now and then.

Shares in Twitter rose 5% in Thursday trading.

Moving into subscriptions could be a way for Twitter to rely less on advertising, which accounted for 86% of the company’s total revenue in 2020. Last month Twitter said it reached a deal to buy newsletter platform Revue Holding BV, tapping into a trend of tech companies providing content creators with tools to make money. The growing space includes other newsletter startups such as Substack Inc. and Rocket Science Group LLC’s Mailchimp.

With tipping, Twitter would join several other social-networking companies that offer users the opportunity to show support for one another or groups of users. Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube, Amazon.com Inc.’s live-streaming service Twitch and chat platform Discord Inc. allow users to purchase digital perks for this purpose.

Though it is working to build other lines of business, Twitter has added and improved tools for advertisers looking to market on the platform. The company has said one way it hopes to grow is by appealing to more small-business advertisers. Most of its advertisers are large companies.

«

So! Which Twitter accounts do you follow that you’d actually pay for?
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Some of biggest Android VPN services’ user data hacked • CyberNews

“Cybernews Team”:

»

The VPN services whose data has been allegedly exfiltrated by the hacker are SuperVPN, which is considered as one of the most popular (and dangerous) VPNs on Google Play with 100,000,000+ installs on the Play store, as well as GeckoVPN (10,000,000+ installs) and ChatVPN (50,000+ installs).

The forum user is selling deeply sensitive device data and login credentials – email addresses and randomly generated strings used as passwords – of more than 21 million VPN users for an undisclosed sum. 

We reached out to SuperVPN, GeckoVPN, and ChatVPN and asked the providers if they could confirm that the leak was genuine but we have received no responses at the time of writing this report.

The author of the forum post is selling three archives, two of which allegedly contain a variety of data apparently collected by the providers from more than 21,000,000 SuperVPN, GeckoVPN, and ChatVPN users, including:
• Email addresses
• Usernames
• Full names
• Country names
• Randomly generated password strings
• Payment-related data
• Premium member status and its expiration date

The forum post author is also offering potential buyers to sort the data by country. The random password strings might indicate that the VPN user accounts could be linked with their Google Play store accounts where the users downloaded their VPN apps from. 

…Based on the samples we saw from the second archive, it appears to contain user device information, including:
• Device serial numbers
• Phone types and manufacturers
• Device IDs
• Device IMSI numbers

If the data sold by the threat actor is genuine, it appears that the VPN providers in question are logging far more information about their users than stated in their Privacy Policies.

«

Remember how podcasts used to be stuffed with ads for VPNs? I still don’t trust them.

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Far-right platform Gab has been hacked—including private data • WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

»

On Sunday night the WikiLeaks-style group Distributed Denial of Secrets is revealing what it calls GabLeaks, a collection of more than 70 gigabytes of Gab data representing more than 40 million posts. DDoSecrets says a hacktivist who self-identifies as “JaXpArO and My Little Anonymous Revival Project” siphoned that data out of Gab’s backend databases in an effort to expose the platform’s largely right-wing users. Those Gab patrons, whose numbers have swelled after Parler went offline, include large numbers of Qanon conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, and promoters of former president Donald Trump’s election-stealing conspiracies that resulted in the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill.

DDoSecrets cofounder Emma Best says that the hacked data includes not only all of Gab’s public posts and profiles—with the exception of any photos or videos uploaded to the site—but also private group and private individual account posts and messages, as well as user passwords and group passwords. “It contains pretty much everything on Gab, including user data and private posts, everything someone needs to run a nearly complete analysis on Gab users and content,” Best wrote in a text message interview with WIRED. “It’s another gold mine of research for people looking at militias, neo-Nazis, the far right, QAnon, and everything surrounding January 6.”

DDoSecrets says it’s not publicly releasing the data due to its sensitivity and the vast amounts of private information it contains. Instead the group says it will selectively share it with journalists, social scientists, and researchers. WIRED viewed a sample of the data, and it does appear to contain Gab users’ individual and group profiles—their descriptions and privacy settings—public and private posts, and passwords. Gab CEO Andrew Torba acknowledged the breach in a brief statement Sunday.

…Among the users whose hashed passwords appeared to be included in the data were those for Donald Trump, Republican congresswoman and QAnon-conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene, MyPillow CEO and election-conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, and disinformation-spouting radio host Alex Jones.

«

So this shows that its security is pretty weak, but it’s hard to see that this will make any difference unless they carefully pick who they disclose to: most of the grim behaviour on Gab is right there in the open.
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SmartThings starts saying goodbye to its hardware • Stacey on IoT

Stacey Higginbotham:

»

If you own a 2013 SmartThings hub (that’s the original) or a SmartThings Link for the Nvidia Shield TV, your hardware will stop working on June 30 of this year. The device depreciation is part of the announced exodus from manufacturing and supporting its own hardware and the Groovy IDE that Samsung Smartthings announced last summer.

…I get that a lot of y’all are going to be upset over this news, especially because transitioning hubs and routines is a pain. If you’d rather abandon the SmartThings ship entirely then we have a list of alternative hubs you can find, although many of them are tough to find in stock owing to chip shortages and supply delays. I’m going to use this moment to argue for companies to put expiration dates on their products so buyers can evaluate how long they should expect a device to last, especially for something like a hub which can require hours of programming and setting up.

Those who purchased the first version of the hub in 2013 to see it stop working after seven years is annoying, but it doesn’t feel like an affront. It’s still pretty early to determine what the lifetime of a smart home hub should be. Based on the discounting plan, Samsung seems to think three years is sufficient, although that seems pretty limited to me. For a hub device, five years feels like a good minimum, and I might even hope it would last a decade. But I am cheap and hate to reprogram my home automation.

The thing I most like about this news is that Samsung is thinking about the death of these products and planning for recycling.

«

If you can in effect hot-swap a new hub for the old, then OK. But not if it involves a ton of reprogramming. That’s going to be the next obstacle for smart homes: what happens when pieces of gear in a complex system reach the end of their lives at different times, until you’re constantly swapping things out and replacements in.
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Biden can’t fix the chip shortage any time soon. Here’s why • The Washington Post

Jeanne Whalen, Reed Albergotti and David J. Lynch:

»

Many of the factors contributing to the shortfall are tied to recent events like the pandemic and the cold snap that slapped Texas and sidelined two chip factories in Austin. But the growing presence of chips in devices large and small foreshadows a supply problem not easily resolved by warmer weather or presidential executive orders. New semiconductor factories are among the most complex manufacturing facilities to build, costing billions of dollars and taking years to construct.

That means much of the world’s electronics industry will continue to depend heavily on existing factories, many of them in Taiwan — a reliance that critics say looks increasingly risky as the island’s tensions with China rise. One Taiwanese company, TSMC, produces 70% of the global auto industry’s supply of a key type of chip called a microcontroller, according to research firm IHS Markit.

“You have an entire global electronics supply chain that is dependent on Taiwan, and it’s 100 miles offshore of China,” said Stacy Rasgon, a semiconductor analyst at the financial services firm AllianceBernstein. “Given everything going on with geopolitical tensions, that’s becoming a strategically untenable position.”

That has helped spark bipartisan calls for government subsidies to encourage construction of more chip factories in the United States, which today hosts 12% of global semiconductor manufacturing.

The supply pinch has hit auto manufacturers particularly hard because they use many chips designed years ago that are lower-priority items for semiconductor makers. Those chips yield lower profit margins than the newer, pricier semiconductors that power 5G smartphones and video games, which are also in high demand worldwide and dominate many manufacturing lines.
The global auto industry will produce 1.5 million to 5 million fewer vehicles this year than originally planned because of the supply constraints, according to the consulting firm AlixPartners. Some analysts predict that could raise auto costs for consumers and threaten jobs in a sector that employs hundreds of thousands of Americans.

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TSMC more and more looks like a basket containing too many eggs. Globalisation is great until it puts your critical infrastructure under the purview of a potentially hostile power.
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Clubhouse users spend hours on the app. What’s the appeal? • Los Angeles Times

Sam Dean:

»

Many have been drawn by simple curiosity, or the promise of hopping into a room with a favorite celebrity. Some are chasing fame and exposure to the growing crowd. Others are there because it’s their job to figure out what’s going on in the social tech world. For the most part, only the most popular performers are making money on the app, by soliciting tips from fans via payment apps.

And then there are those scammers.

The grifts run the gamut from the most basic — persuading people to pay for invitations to the app, or to join a room or a club — to multi-phase chicanery.

Users claiming to be business experts have run pitch rooms, Harfoush said, where they invite hopeful entrepreneurs to outline their dreams for a new business on stage, and then go register related domain names with the intent of selling them back to the hopefuls at a markup. Fake literary agents promise aspiring authors that they’ll edit their manuscripts and connect them with publishers, for an upfront fee.

Other users claiming to be music producers invite aspiring beatmakers to present their tracks live for critique, and then simply steal the tracks as their own. And motivational speakers are using Clubhouse as a new venue to convince anyone that they can learn how to become a millionaire — if only they pay thousands of dollars for an exclusive executive coaching seminar. Audience plants, fake time limits and other hard-sell tactics abound.

The anti-grift squad makes a point of not naming bad actors in their weekly sessions, in part to avoid another risk that’s emerged as Clubhouse has grown: harassment and retaliation. Users with significant follower bases can coordinate mass blockings and reportings of users who accuse them of wrongdoing (or whom they simply dislike), which can result in temporary suspension. Clubhouse declined to comment for this article.

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Apple Watch is now worn on 100 million wrists • Above Avalon

Neil Cybart:

»

More than 100 million people wear an Apple Watch. Based on my estimates, Apple surpassed the important adoption milestone this past December. The Apple Watch has already helped usher in a new paradigm shift in computing, and Apple is still only getting started with what is possible on the wrist. New services designed specifically for Apple Watch (such as Fitness+) are being released. The wrist’s utility continues to be unveiled thanks to new hardware and software features revolving around health monitoring.

It took five-and-a-half years for the Apple Watch installed base to surpass 100 million people. As shown in the figure, the installed base’s growth trajectory has not been constant or steady over the years. Instead, the number of people entering the Apple Watch installed base continues to accelerate. The 30 million new people that began wearing an Apple Watch in 2020 nearly exceeded the number of new Apple Watch wearers in 2015, 2016, and 2017 combined.

«

Certainly I notice a growing number of people wearing an Apple Watch who I wouldn’t have expected to where I live in the UK (not in a city). The launch of Fitness+ is fortunately timed: I’ve been trying it out, and realise that it gives you the encouraging feeling that you’re doing the workout with a group, not just with an instructor. And in These Times, that’s a strong positive.

The doubts about the Apple Watch at its launch were reasonable: the fashion missteps (blame Jony Ive) were, quickly enough, erased in favour of exercise and health. I wonder if Tim Cook had some input into that: he’s a lot more into fitness than fashion.
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How a 10-second video clip sold for $6.6m • Reuters

Elizabeth Howcroft and Ritvik Carvalho:

»

In October 2020, Miami-based art collector Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile spent almost $67,000 on a 10-second video artwork that he could have watched for free online. Last week, he sold it for $6.6 million.

The video by digital artist Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, was authenticated by blockchain, which serves as a digital signature to certify who owns it and that it is the original work.

It’s a new type of digital asset – known as a non-fungible token (NFT) – that has exploded in popularity during the pandemic as enthusiasts and investors scramble to spend enormous sums of money on items that only exist online.

Blockchain technology allows the items to be publicly authenticated as one-of-a-kind, unlike traditional online objects which can be endlessly reproduced.

“You can go in the Louvre and take a picture of the Mona Lisa and you can have it there, but it doesn’t have any value because it doesn’t have the provenance or the history of the work,” said Rodriguez-Fraile, who said he first bought Beeple’s piece because of his knowledge of the U.S.-based artist’s work.

“The reality here is that this is very, very valuable because of who is behind it.”

«

2001 internet: haha! Copyright is dead, everything can be replicated infinitely, your content has no value!

2021 internet: we really like digital things that are unique, how much can we pay?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Sanitising hands and surfaces doesn’t make any difference to the spread of Covid. So why do we keep on doing it? CC-licensed photo by Hazel Nicholson on Flickr.

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A selection of 11 links for you. Not disinfected. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How public-health messaging over coronavirus, the pandemic and the vaccine backfired • The Atlantic

Zeynep Tufekci:

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Five key fallacies and pitfalls have affected public-health messaging, as well as media coverage, and have played an outsize role in derailing an effective pandemic response. These problems were deepened by the ways that we—the public—developed to cope with a dreadful situation under great uncertainty. And now, even as vaccines offer brilliant hope, and even though, at least in the United States, we no longer have to deal with the problem of a misinformer in chief, some officials and media outlets are repeating many of the same mistakes in handling the vaccine rollout.

The pandemic has given us an unwelcome societal stress test, revealing the cracks and weaknesses in our institutions and our systems. Some of these are common to many contemporary problems, including political dysfunction and the way our public sphere operates. Others are more particular, though not exclusive, to the current challenge—including a gap between how academic research operates and how the public understands that research, and the ways in which the psychology of coping with the pandemic have distorted our response to it.

Recognizing all these dynamics is important, not only for seeing us through this pandemic—yes, it is going to end—but also to understand how our society functions, and how it fails. We need to start shoring up our defenses, not just against future pandemics but against all the myriad challenges we face—political, environmental, societal, and technological. None of these problems is impossible to remedy, but first we have to acknowledge them and start working to fix them—and we’re running out of time.

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Tufekci, as I keep saying, has an astonishing ability to cut through the noise in any situation. If I were in charge of anything bigger than a skiff, I’d be calling her for advice regularly. I think her background as a sociologist gives her that skill at understanding what is important, and what is just people being thoughtless people.

(Her five fallacies are: risk compensation, rules in place of mechanisms and intuitions, scolding and shaming, harm reduction, and the balance between knowledge and action. But of course you really should read it for yourself.
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First vaccine to fully immunize against malaria builds on pandemic-driven RNA tech • The Academic Times

Monisha Ravisetti:

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Making a vaccine for malaria is challenging because its associated parasite, Plasmodium, contains a protein that inhibits production of memory T-cells, which protect against previously encountered pathogens. If the body can’t generate these cells, a vaccine is ineffective. But scientists recently tried a new approach using an RNA-based platform. 

Their design circumvented the sneaky protein, allowed the body to produce the needed T-cells and completely immunized against malaria. The patent application for their novel vaccine, which hasn’t yet been tested on humans, was published by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office on Feb. 4.

“It’s probably the highest level of protection that has been seen in a mouse model,” said Richard Bucala, co-inventor of the new vaccine and a physician and professor at Yale School of Medicine.

The team’s breakthrough could save hundreds of thousands of lives, particularly in developing nations.

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OK, but: IN MICE. Many a slip between murine and human. Still: this is the third mRNA vaccine we’ve seen in testing: after Covid, there was multiple sclerosis, and now this. The latter two, of course, in mice only so far.
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What do you miss least about pre-lockdown life? • eRambler

Jez Cope:

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The first thing that leaps to my mind is commuting. At various points in my life I’ve spent between one and three hours a day travelling to and from work and I’ve never more than tolerated it at best. It steals time from your day, and societal norms dictate that it’s your leisure and self-care time that must be sacrificed. Longer commutes allow more time to get into a book or podcast, especially if not driving, but I’d rather have that time at home rather than trying to be comfortable in a train seat designed for some mythical average man shaped nothing like me!

The other thing I don’t miss is the colds and flu! Before the pandemic, British culture encouraged working even when ill, which meant constantly coming into contact with people carrying low-grade viruses. I’m not immunocompromised but some allergies and residue of being asthmatic as a child meant that I would get sick two or three times a year. A pleasant side-effect of the COVID precautions we’re all taking is that I haven’t been sick for over 12 months now, which is amazing!

Finally, I don’t miss having so little control over my environment. One of the things that working from home has made clear is that there are certain unavoidable aspects of working in my shared office that cause me sensory stress, and that are completely unrelated to my work. Working (or trying to work) next to a noisy automatic scanner; trying to find a light level that works for 6 different people doing different tasks; lacking somewhere quiet and still to eat lunch and recover from a morning of meetings or the constant vaguely-distracting bustle of a large shared office.

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I bet a lot of people really don’t want to go back to commuting – for the cost, as much as the time. But equally, I bet there’s a lot who really do want to get away from their home surroundings, and wallow in a totally different milieu.
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E Day • Archiepyedia

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The first known celebration of e Day is believed to have occurred on January 27 1983, thus predating the very first Pi day by over five years. This happened when a group of second-year mathematics undergraduates at the University of Unter Über Schlesswig Holstein decided that they had had enough of calculus and were instead going to get blind drunk on several crates of low-quality, high-strength Weissbier. The resulting rampage through the town is estimated to have caused twenty-four million deutschmarks’ worth of damage. However, the ringleaders avoided any punishment by pointing out the date, 27/1/83, and claiming that they were in fact celebrating the transcendental mathematical constant to five significant figures. Despite strong suspicions that this was a complete coincidence, the university and municipal authorities eventually backed down.

There were no further celebrations of e Day for several years after this, as mathematics departments in universities throughout the world maintained a state of high alert in case of any repetition of the Unter Über Schlesswig Holstein incident. However, when the first Pi Day went off without any apparent problems in 1988, a small celebration of e Day was allowed in 1990 and has continued thereafter.

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You’ve heard of Pi day. Are you sure there isn’t an e day? (Via Jonathan Pinnock)
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Convenience of public phone boxes near end of line • Financial Times

Nic Fildes:

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About half of Britain’s 40,000 public telephone boxes are set to disappear from the streets as BT scraps kiosks that attract more visitors wanting to “spend a penny” than make a 60p phone call.

The telecoms company’s phone booths, including 7,000 traditional red phone boxes, still handle about 33,000 calls a day, despite universal mobile phone ownership. Yet more than half the boxes lose money and about a third do not handle a single phone call in any given month.

Gerry McQuade, head of BT’s wholesale unit which runs the pay phones business, said he has speeded up plans to cull 20,000 phone boxes and focus on profitable locations. “Very few of them make any money as it stands. In aggregate, it costs us more to collect the money than the phone boxes generate,” he said.

BT has already reduced its phone box estate from a peak of 92,000 in 1992 before the advent of mobile phones reduced the relevance of the traditional pay phone. The number of calls made in phone boxes has dropped 80% from its peak and continues to dwindle at a rate of about 20% a year.

Most of the boxes have become a burden for the company, which has to repair smashed panes of glass and clean up the mess when members of the public use the pay phone as a public convenience.

The annual cost of repairing phone boxes hit £7m five years ago and the company still struggles with illegal activity in some locations where phone boxes can be used to organise drug deals.

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Probably also a proxy for landlines overall. I’d love to know how many home movers now don’t attach a phone to their landline (which is generally required for providing broadband).
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Politics Odds: UK 5/1 to rejoin EU by 2026 as Brexit bites • Betfair

Max Liu:

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The UK is 5/1 to rejoin the European Union amid growing concerns that the Brexit trade deal has left the country poorer and less secure.

So far the government has played down claims from businesses and fisherman that the deal has damaged their exports and ignored concerns from the valuable performing arts sector.

But this week a group of Conservatives said the deal had left the UK “less safe and less secure” and called for Boris Johnson to reopen talks with the EU about security co-operation.

Dominic Grieve and David Lidington, a former attorney general and de facto deputy prime minister respectively, lead the calls. They both voted Remain and were vocal critics of the government’s handling of Brexit, so you might conclude that it’s a case of the usual Remainer suspects trying to scupper the outcome.

On the other hand, as the reality of Brexit bites it could be that this is a taste of things to come.

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Wow! Excepppppppppt: if you look at the market predictor, it’s offering 1-10 (a bet of £10 gets you £11) on remaining out. So if you bet £10 on staying out, and £1 on going back in, if we stay out: you lose nothing. If we go back in, you win £6, losing £5 in total. Funny kind of game.
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Dispo, David Dobrik’s photo-sharing app, is taking off • The New York Times

Taylor Lorenz:

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Dispo, a new photo-sharing app that mimics the experience of using a disposable camera, is taking off. People are clamoring for invites to test the beta version. Early adopters are praising its social features. And investors are betting big on its future.

In the app, users frame photographs through a small rectangular viewfinder. There are no editing tools or captions; when the images “develop” — i.e. show up on your phone at 9 a.m. the next day — you get what you get. Multiple people can take photos on the same roll, as might happen with a real disposable camera at a party.

“When I used to go to parties with my friends, they would have disposable cameras all throughout the house, and they’d urge people to take pictures throughout the night,” said David Dobrik, a YouTube star and a founder of the app. “In the morning, they’d collect all the cameras and look back at the footage and be like, ‘What happened last night?’” (He used an expletive for emphasis.)

He and his friends loved the serendipity of scrolling through fleeting and forgotten moments. “It would be like the ending of ‘The Hangover’ every morning,” Mr. Dobrik, 24, said. He started posting his developed photographs on a dedicated Instagram account in June 2019, and quickly racked up millions of followers. Other influencers and celebrities, including Tana Mongeau and Gigi Hadid, soon started their own “disposable” accounts; their fans followed suit.

Sensing a trend, Mr. Dobrik sought to recreate the disposable-camera experience digitally, as an antidote to the obsession with getting the perfect shot. “You never looked at the picture, you never checked the lighting,” he said of using disposables. “You just went on with your day, and in the morning you got to relive it.”

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Delayed gratification: who would have guessed that we were in the mood for it after a year of on-off lockdowns. This does sound a bit like Hipstamatic, which had a similar Polaroid-picture feel, but was thoroughly steamrollered by Instagram because it lacked social features.

Expected future app: something that mimics taking a picture with film, where you have to do some gesture to wind it on.
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Apple fans are obsessed with this TikToker’s awesome iPhone hack • BGR

Yoni Heisler:

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Say, for example, you want to move eight applications from your home screen to the second page of apps on your device. Normally, you’d press down on an app and select the “Edit Home Screen” option from the contextual menu. Once the apps started wiggling, you’d manually drag each application, one by one, from the home screen to the second page of apps. Needless to say, this can quickly get tedious, especially if you’re trying to move apps from the home screen to, say, the fifth page of apps on your iPhone.

This iPhone trick, however, allows you to simultaneously select multiple applications and move them to another page all at once. Here’s how it works.

To get started, long-press on an app icon until the contextual menu appears. From there, select the “Edit Home Screen” selection. Once the applications start wiggling, press down on an application you’d like to move to another page and move it slightly in any direction. You’ll want to make sure that you keep your finger pressed down on the app the entire time. From there, with your finger still on the screen, take your other finger and simply tap every other application you’d like to move to another page. Upon doing so, you’ll see every newly-tapped application be whisked away to the first app icon’s location. It may seem like you’re adding all of the apps into a folder, but that’s not the case.

Once you’ve selected every app you want to move, drag the collection of app icons to the right or left, depending on which page you want to move them to. Upon doing that, all of the selected apps will re-appear on the new page.

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The video makes it look like the simplest, most obvious thing ever. But: though I wasn’t aware of it, it’s been available since iOS 11, in 2017. Touch interfaces hide their complexity through the lack of a menu bar.
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How heat pumps help homeowners fight climate change • The Atlantic

Ian Bogost:

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we expend energy glorifying electric cars. For this year’s Super Bowl, General Motors spent millions on a star-studded ad celebrating its ambitious electric-vehicle plans. It was surprising, but not out of place. Less surprisingly, no heat-pump ads aired during the big game. Even if trust in the grid can be improved, electric heat faces one big problem: Transitioning off natural gas just isn’t as sexy as solar panels or electric cars. Unless you’re a contractor or an HVAC nerd, you probably don’t think much about your heating and cooling systems. They are hidden in attics and basements and utility closets, tucked away on roofs or in side yards. These machines go almost entirely unconsidered unless they break down. Nobody shows off their new water heater when friends come over the way they might show off a Tesla in the garage.

Unlike solar panels, clean upgrades to home appliances also don’t produce social-signaling benefits—the neighbors can’t gawk at your greener home, and you can’t take pride in passersby noticing it. How do you make a heat pump sexy? “I don’t know,” Scott Blunk, Sacramento Municipal Utility District [SMUD]’s strategic business planner of electrification and energy efficiency, admitted. “I think the closest we have is cooking.” He means the blue flame of a stove, the only place in the home where a resident can see and hear and feel natural gas at work. Stove-top cooking is so essential to justifying home gas service, the fossil-fuel industry has poured resources into preserving the appliances’ appeal.

Even SMUD’s executives felt protective of kitchen gas. “You’re never going to get rid of my gas stove,” Blunk recalled them saying. So he bought them portable induction-cooking units (a kind of electric stove that transfers heat directly to cookware) to demonstrate that modern electric cooking heat wasn’t like the old wire coils they might remember from the 1950s.

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And yet heat upmps are amazingly efficient. That plus electric cars, you’re a long way towards the taget.
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Bill Gates explains why he still prefers Android over iPhone during interview on Clubhouse • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

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Gates has talked about his use of Android in the past, so Sorkin was curious [in an interview with Gates on Clubhouse] if his preference might have changed, given that he was speaking through a service that’s only available on iOS.

In response, the Microsoft founder explained that he still prefers an Android, but that he keeps an iPhone around to try out — and apparently for joining Clubhouse rooms. Gates’ reasoning for using Android is because manufacturers often pre-install Microsoft software:

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I actually use an Android phone. Because I want to keep track of everything, I’ll often play around with iPhones, but the one I carry around happens to be Android. Some of the Android manufacturers pre-install Microsoft software in a way that makes it easy for me. They’re more flexible about how the software connects up with the operating system. So that’s what I ended up getting used to. You know, a lot of my friends have iPhone , so there’s no purity.

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The reasoning here is a bit odd because you can download Microsoft apps from the App Store on iPhone, and even now adjust your default browser and email apps with iOS 14, so it’s not clear what Gates is referring to.

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Wouldn’t expect BillG to be up on the ins and outs of what iOS 14 has brought – he has very much better things to be concerned about – but there’s a wonderful irony in him appearing on (what is presently) an iPhone-only service. How did he get on there, exactly? Did someone loan him a phone? Did he switch his SIM into an iPhone? Inquiring minds need the detail.
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Google says it’s working to get ‘Hey Google’ working on Wear OS again • The Verge

Mitchell Clark:

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Activating the Google Assistant by saying “Hey Google” has been broken for months, according to a report from 9to5Google. Google tells The Verge it’s now working on a fix, saying that it’s “aware of the issues some users have been encountering” and will help its partners “address these and improve the overall experience.”

There are a good number of users reporting the issue — a post on Google’s Issue Tracker has almost a thousand stars. Reading through the thread, it’s clear that many users with different smartwatch models are all reporting the same issue going back to November 2020. They say the assistant isn’t completely unusable, as users are still able to trigger it with a long button-press, but if the voice-activation feature hasn’t been working for that long, it likely doesn’t help the perception that Google doesn’t care about Wear OS.

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First reported on November 9, 2020; implies that Google staff who use Wear OS don’t use that feature either. I think the phrase “Google doesn’t care about Wear OS” probably rolls it all up; Google’s now much more interested in making Fitbit its thing.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified